I don't know if the followig story is funny, but it is a source of conflict.
My sister-in-law is about 50 years old. She and my brother never met until about 12 years ago, and got married just 10 years ago. But her apartment tennure goes all the way back to the early 1980's when she was in her 30's.
Around 1981, New York City was beset with crime. People were terrified to walk at night, even in the poshy neighborhoods of Manhattan. And my sister-in-law, i her 30's at the time, was just looking for a super cheap place to live.
She found a truly messed up neighborhood on the Upper West Side called Morningside Heights. It was a totally bombed out wreck of a neighborhood with boarded up storefronts and grafito everywhere. But the buildings -- all the BEAUTIFUL buildings! She just knew in her heart "This neighborhood will come back into fashion again one day, I know it will!"
She located a super-duper cheap apartment in an old 12-story building on 110th street near the corner of Broadway (which is where an express subway station is found!), that was built around 1905. The fact that it is 12 stories is very important -- in New York City, an old law going all the way back to about 1860 or 1880 (somewhere in there) mandates that any building within the City limits built to be 7 stories tall or higher MUST have an elevator. (And so, all the buildings in Harlem are only 6 stories high or shorter). Not only was every single building in all directions from my future sister-in-law's apartment a Pre-WWI building of beauitulf granite and lovely sculpting on the outside (grafiti be damned!), but they were all also "elevator buildings." None of the buildings in that neighborhood had doormen at the time (although they once did have doormen going back over 50 years) because the neigborhod was not classy enough ir highrent enough to have doormen (anymore). But having an elevator in a Pre-WWI building was really cool!
Well, she moved into that building in 1981 for a monthly rent of just $400 a month. And she was able to get rent-control. As the year's passed, crime in New York City began to wane, and the neighborhood she was living in slowly began to turn around. The grafitti disappeared. The closed up shop fronts started getting rented by fruit vendors and hardware stores and really nice cafes and natural foods markets. A new building owner took over her building, revitalized the building, and brought in the New York City Doorman's Union. So now, she was living in a "true" elevator buiding complete with a uniformed doorman on duty 24 hours a day. The whole neighborhood started going "doorman" at that point with lovely canvas canopies out in front held up by brass poles that the doormen polished every day, and flower boxes and potted plants out front on either side of those brass poles and flower boxes on all the first-floor windows. It was hard to tell this neighborhood apart from Park Avenue with all those brass-posts and canopies and flower pots and uniformed doormen.
By the late 1990's, the whole Upper West Side was becoming the hottest section of Manhattan to move into, and the beautiful revival of Morninghside Heights was the centerpiece of that new hot zone. My sister-in-law's building was most particualrly sought after because it was RIGHT ON 110th Street half a block from that express subway station found on the corner of 110th and Broadway. So rents i the neighborhoosd were through the roof But ... she had rent control! By the year 2000 (a year or so after she and my brother married), she and my brother were only paying $1,000 a month for an elevator building with a doorman half a block from an express subway station in one of the hippest most cafe-laden neighborhoods in Manhattan while newly-renting tennants in that same building were paying over $1,800 a month.
By 2004, the building decided to go condo.
What a fiasco!
She and my brother were paying a rent-contrlled rate of just $1,200 a month during 2004. The newly renting tennants were paying $2,900 a month. And if my brother and his wife wanted to buy their apartment it was going to cost $2 million.
The whole building was bitterly divided over the condo thing and decided to form a tennants' organzation to try and band together to make demands of the landlord as far as this whole condo thing went. I am not privy to all of the details of their demands, but I do know that about 30% of the building (including my brother and his wife) agreed to join that tenants' coalition to stand up to the landlord and make these demands, and so they all signed a "No-Buy Agreement" whereby they all agreed to abstain from buying the condos unless the demands were met. Well ... the demands were never met. And so they were all locked into the No-Buy clause. After the battle was lost, that 30% of the building started talking about forgetting the No-Buy agreement and to just let whoever wanted to buy go ahead and buy. But there were a few stalwarts who decided to hang on to the bitter end and they refused to release everyone/anyone else from the No-Buy agreement. So my brother and his wife never got to buy. She says that to this day (6 years later!) there are people in the building who will not speak to each other because of that whole situation -- people wo refused to even take part in the No-Buy agreement, as well as people who did take part and later wanted out of the agreement.
